For a causal fan, I know Wayne Gretzky but not Robitaille. However, his status is bigger than Gretzky in front of the downtown in LA. As I was amusing loud, one of the guys in team’s uniform, pointed to a man walking by me, “that’s him.”
Oh well. I was too slow to take a better picture of him.

As the Beijing Kunlun Red Stars hit the ice to face off against a team from Moscow, tension is high. A win tonight is crucial to make it to the playoffs in the Kontinental Hockey League, or KHL, Russia’s top professional hockey league, second only to the U.S. National Hockey League in talent.

But hardly anyone in the 15,000-seat Beijing arena understands the stakes. In fact, there’s hardly anyone here; a vast majority of the seats are empty.

“I tried to get my son’s family to come with me, but they weren’t interested. I haven’t seen a hockey game in 20 years — I forget the rules. I can’t figure it out. One team is Russian, but who’s the other team?” she asks me.

That’s your Beijing team, I tell her. She looks up from her knitting and squints through oversized spectacles.

“Oh. But they’re all foreigners! China’s no good at hockey,” she concludes, returning to her knitting.

After China won its bid to host the 2022 Olympics, President Xi Jinping vowed to get 300 million of his people “on the ice,” an initiative to encourage winter sports. Energy tycoons in China and Russia quickly made a deal to create Beijing’s first professional hockey club, and Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing for the signing ceremony with Xi last June. Kunlun Red Star was born — the first Chinese club to join Russia’s premier KHL league.

China’s team has 18 players from Russia, Finland, Canada and the United States. There are a few Chinese nationals, but none of them can compete at this level and they rarely see ice time.

Team CEO Emma Liao says sponsors, many with close connections to China’s government, have already covered the $30 million cost needed to run the Red Stars. Now comes the hard part: educating the public about the team — and about hockey, for that matter.

“Nobody really knows what is hockey,” Liao says with a sigh. “So our job is to educate the audience [about] what is hockey, why it’s so attractive and why they should come to watch the hockey game.”

Few people have done this more than Mark Simon, a Canadian hockey coach who’s worked for years to raise awareness about the sport in China and now volunteers as an assistant for the Red Stars. On this particular day, he’s juggling an order for new jerseys with a hospital visit to the team’s goalie, who’s out with an injury.

Mark Simon, a Canadian hockey coach, now volunteers as an assistant for the Red Stars.
Rob Schmitz/NPR
Simon says he wasn’t sure what to think when he first heard about the team. “Great idea — KHL. China, Russia, you know, the Communist brothers and all the stuff. I mean, I get it,” he says. “But I still thought, you know, it’s early. To expect that you’re going to fill an NHL-sized rink is insane.”

Simon says the Red Stars have already broken a KHL record for lowest attendance at a single game — 550 people.

The sparse crowds can make for an awkward game-day experience, when the team’s 12-member cheerleading squad’s cheers are swallowed by the void of a near-empty arena. Or when the announcer – who Simon complains doesn’t know a thing about hockey – begins an exuberant cheer for the Red Stars two seconds after the opposing team scores.

A group of spectators from Finland is amused, and a little confused.

They say the game would be better if they were drunk. But tight security rules prohibit alcohol inside the arena. They’re the only audience members I meet who’ve actually bought tickets. Peter Solonen, one of the Finns, says he’s never seen a hockey game with such good talent attract so few fans.

“They’ve still got something to learn,” he says with a laugh. “You don’t see hockey anywhere else but inside the stadium. Nowhere else. That is weird.”

It may be weird, but for Red Stars player Zach Yuen, it’s a dream come true. He was the first Chinese-Canadian defenseman drafted by the NHL, and he’s chosen to come here now, to play in his homeland.

“When I was growing up, I never had a role model,” says Yuen. “It would’ve been cool to have a role model to look up to. Just to know that it’s possible. Because the entry to hockey is tough for sure, culturally. In China, there are kids that watch our games and hopefully, I can live up to that and be a role model for them.”

Kids like Yuan Zhongfan, who’s practicing with his team in Shanghai, could use a role model. The eight-year-old loves hockey, but he’s not sure how supportive his parents will be when he gets older.

“My mom wanted me to learn swimming, but I wasn’t tall enough. There was a hockey rink nearby, so we picked that,” he says.

Yuan says his dream is to play for the Chicago Blackhawks. I ask him what his parents think about this. “They don’t think it’s possible,” he says, “because no Chinese player has made it to the NHL.”

Yuan’s parents have never heard of Zach Yuen, and they don’t know much about the Red Stars — who, as it happens, lost their big game and have likely lost their chance to make it to the playoffs. But China’s government is dreaming big about hockey. And no matter how obscure the sport is today, if he works hard, this eight-year-old from Shanghai may someday get a shot at his dream, too.

I’ve long heard that China has a football league and see it today, on tv. (Wiki: Chinese Super League 中超联赛 or CSL) The arena looks like a kid’s playpen -:), no insult intended. The players are mixed bag of people.

It’s going to be held at Fulton Market Building in South Street Seaport, downtown New York City, starting tomorrow Nov 11-30.

Magnus Carlsen is the current champ from Norway. The Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin (Jan 12, 1990) becomes an International Master at age 11 and the GM Grandmaster at age 12 – the youngest – surpassing Bu Xiangzhi 卜祥志 who’s 13 in 1999, my idol Bobby Fischer was 15 in 1958.

Robert James Fischer (1943 – 2008)’s the Match of the Century beating the then title holder Boris Spassky to win world championship in 1972 was epic. A lonesome American defeating a team of Russians and its strong hold on the championship – 24 years uninterrupted. Aside from the cold war background, the championship itself was full of dramas. From disagreement on locations for the championship – they finally settled on Reykjavík, Iceland, to lack of prize money (which then doubled to US$250,000), to refusal to continue the second game due to the playing condition, (a championship match usually contains 20+ games) which could have forfeited the entire match to Spassky. Out of sportsmanship, Spassky gave in to Fischer’s demand because he didn’t want to win by default. After 21 games in 2 months (1st on July 11 and the last on Aug 31), Fischer won 12½–8½ becoming the 11th World Champion.

Funny as history would have, Fischer refused to defend his title in 1975 due to some of his demands not being met, forfeiting his title to the Russian rising star Anatoly Karpov.

The significance of this match, in the eyes of the world, wasn’t about Fischer but world power. It’s all about USA and USSR. The former champ who succeeded Karpov and a fellow New Yorker Garry Kasparov sums it up the best:

I think the reason you look at these matches probably was not so much the chess factor but to the political element, which was inevitable because in the Soviet Union, chess was treated by the Soviet authorities as a very important and useful ideological tool to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Soviet communist regime over the decadent West. That’s why the Spassky defeat […] was treated by people on both sides of the Atlantic as a crushing moment in the midst of the Cold War.

Fischer played against computer program developed by Richard Greenblatt @ MIT in 1977 and won all three games.

Strong evidence supported that he’s an illegitimate child, and from an impoverished childhood. When the riches found him after the 1972 championship, he declined. Unfortunately better part of his life was a mess – perhaps he felt nothing else to prove – but no one would forget his epic battle when he’s 29. The adaga that truth is indeed stranger than fiction, couldn’t have written better.

Highly recommend this book Searching for Bobby Fischer, warmly and smartly written by the prodigy Joshua Waitzkin’s dad intelligently; although Josh would only rose to an International Master. There’s a movie of the same title out in 1993.

Fischer played/developed his skills at two NYC premier chess clubs, Manhattan Chess Club (1877-2002) which had closed and the prestigious Marshall chess club. I’ve been to both. The interior of the Marshall is just magnificent in an elegant brownstone on 10th Street.

Chess appeals to Wall Street, at least when I subscribed to chess magazines a while ago, there were plenty ads seeking/recruiting chess players, as they drool over West Points grads. Bankers Athletic League chess tournament is a pretty serious thing where my husband had played.

Chinese women have been dominated the chess world since 1991: Xie Jun 谢军 (1991–1996 and 1999–2001); Zhu Chen 诸宸(2001–04); Xu Yuhua 许昱华 (2006-8); Hou Yifan 侯逸凡 (2010–2012, 2013–2015 and 2016-). Chess has two world championships, Open and Women’s – women are allowed to play in both. The youngest Polgár sisters Judit is the best female player for the past two decades but she never competes in Women’s. I saw her play in Vienna in 1990 – yes she’s the only girl.

IMHO, two other epic battles are Miracle on Ice 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, between United States, and the defending gold medalists, USSR, and Van Cliburn winning the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, in Moscow.